Posted
by
kdawson
on Monday July 20, 2009 @11:23PM
from the like-a-perp-walk-only-without-the-cameras dept.

An anonymous reader recommends an Ars Technica account of a breakthrough in efforts toward quantum computing. German scientists have managed to get cesium atoms in a state called a "quantum walk": basically a superposition of all the possible states of a particle. "Quantum walks were first proposed by physicist Richard Feynman and are, in terms of probability, the opposite of a random walk. A random walk might be modeled by a person flipping a coin, and for each flip he steps left for heads and right for tails. In this case, his most probable location is the center, with the probability distribution tapering off in either direction. A quantum walk involves the use of internal states and superpositions, and results in the hypothetical person 'exploring' every possible position simultaneously." In the abstract of the paper from Science (subscription needed for full-text access), the researchers say: "Our system allows the observation of the quantum-to-classical transition and paves the way for applications, such as quantum cellular automata."

To your first question: Yes. There would be a new instruction set called "Eigen". It would contain all possible values simultaneously. The interesting thing about such a value is that it could be used to determine the correct value of any problem simply by casting it to the appropriate data type. Since the other instruction sets can only contain a single value at any time, the correct value (for our universe) is automatically saved in the other data type.